IntelliJ IDEA

Download the IDE from the official download page for your operating system. After successful installation, open it and follow the plugin configuration instructions below.

IntelliJ IDEA is available in two falvors: Ultimate and Community Edition. The latter is free and provides sufficient features for Scala on Android development. It is also the reference version of this documentation. Of course, the Ultimate edition is more powerful than the Community Edition and is absolutely suitable as well.

Troubleshooting

IDE integration tends to break easily. If it doesn't work for you, have a look on the methods below to overcome common issues.

gen-idea

If the IDE import does not work out, you can let the gen-ideasbt plugin generate the configuration files instead.

gen-idea is a sbt task that generates configuration files for the IntelliJ IDEA. To install the gen-idea plugin create the file ~/.sbt/0.13/plugins/gen-idea.sbt (the filename is arbitrary) with the contents below.

Now, navigate your terminal to the project root directory and run sbt gen-idea. This will create IntelliJ IDEA 13 configuration files, but newer versions of IntelliJ IDEA are able to convert the configuration to their appropriate format.

You can now chose the Open option of the IntelliJ IDEA and select the root directory of your project.

Converting the project files only needs to be done once at the initial setup. When the IDE finished loading you may delete the /projectFilesBackup folder.

Import the Android dependency explicitly

If your setup is basically working, but imports of the Android SDK are red, you can fix that by manually importing the android.jar. Go to File → Project Structure and change the SDK of each module (in the Dependencies tab) from Android to a simple JavaSDK. Then, add the android.jar via + → JARs or directories and navigate to $ANDROID_HOME/platforms/android-x/android.jar.

This approach does unfortunately sacrifice the IDE source code lookup for Android sources.

Start all over

If everything fails, remove the .idea* directories from the project's root directory and start over by importing the sbt project.